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Iron Brigade Rise of the Martian Bear DLC Review

Trenched was a game released by Double Fine a few months ago. Since then it has proved that it was a bearded ball of fine and has undergone a name change to Iron Brigade. Rise of the Martian Bear is the first piece of downloadable content for the game and it brings back the mustaches but this time they are on a bear. It adds some great things to the game and breathes new life into a title that had just been revived with the addition of survival mode.

Pros:

Loot: There are tons of new items included in Rise of the Martian Bear that you can use to show off your personality. There are new paint jobs, outfits, salutes, and of course hats. There are also references to other Double Fine games hidden in these new customization options. There are upgrades for older weapons and some completely new stuff altogether that adds fresh style to the game.

Content: The DLC is priced at five dollars and the content you get is of gargantuan paportains. There are five new levels included in the campaign and two new levels for survival mode. If all that doesn’t tickle your fancy, you also get new enemies and tons of new loot. Plus the double fisted taunts are worth five dollars on their own because they are great.

Humor: Every Double Fine game is plagued with their amazingly unique humor. I mean Vlad transported himself into his pet bear that rocks the mustache/Beard combo. If you don’t see that as hilarious then your humor switch may be turned to off.

Achievements: Most XBLA gamers enjoy more Gamerscore and this DLC adds 50 points worth. There is an achievement completing the DLC, one for completing wave 20 on the swamp survival map, and the most difficult one is for completing wave 30 on the settlement survival map. Will you be able to get the full Gamerscore again?

Cons: (Spoilers)

Martian Bear: The DLC has Vlad transplanting his mind into a bear with some facial hair and heading to Mars. You follow suit in the U.S.S McKinley and expect to take this bear down, but you don’t. You only get to see it on the televisions throughout the game. With the DLC being titled the way it was and the bear being so awesome, I wanted to battle it and send it into permanent hibernation.

Settlement: This map is played both in the campaign and as a survival map. It is a very difficult map as you have to defend four different points. By yourself this map will take many attempts to figure out how to complete but it had to be designed with co-op in mind. Even playing in co-op, if your team isn’t very coordinated or makes one small mistake it could be all over. It seems that most of the DLC was designed with co-op as the main goal but I do wish there was a way to scale the difficulty to be able to play alone if we decided to.

In Conclusion:

Rise of the Martian Bear is worth the money that it takes to blast into space. You get so much for such a small admittance price and I can only expect that you will enjoy blasting more tubes in your customizable mech. I hope that this is only the first on many DLCs we will see for Iron Brigade and I can wait to see what is next from Double Fine with their recent popularity from their Kickstarter promotion.